This is how I disappear

It happens for the first time a week after the funeral.

He’d taken time away from work and spent it avoiding her books and the hair still clutched in her hairbrush. Her clothes were strewn along the bedroom floor, a relic of him angrily tearing out lace dresses and silk slips, trying to find something to dress her in to say goodbye.

And that’s the first thing he notices when he gets back from work for the first time in a week. The dresses hung up, no longer carpeting the floor, blouses re-buttoned and set in their drawers.
And maybe it was him. Maybe he, sleep-dazed and tired-eyed, had put her belongings back where she’d left them.

He doesn’t mention it until the second time. Sleepy eyes barely open as he hoists his exhausted body from the sofa, shaking pins and needles down his trousers as he walks to the kitchen sink, he dumps his half-empty bowl of ramen atop the pile of dishes. The water they’re in is lukewarm, murky grey with soggy food floating along its surface. He sighs, squirts some dish soap into the concoction, tosses the half-empty bottle back on the windowsill, not looking at where it lands.

He's almost expecting it. Not in any way that stifles the surprise of seeing, the next morning, his kitchen a sparkling white that it hasn’t been since they’d moved in, but he feels his heart kick with the joy of realising that a wish he’d barely let himself hope for had come true.

              “She’s here,” he tells a friend over lunch, spraying the table with crumbs. His hands flail as he describes the kitchen, enthuses about the clothes, the shirts put right where she’d have put them. Their eyes are sad as they watch him, hand warm when it encircles his.

              “I think you should talk to someone.”

 

So he does. Perhaps not the someone they’d meant, but he is talking. The board is a cheap thing, borrowed from the office goth who’d given him an arched eyebrow, a knowing smile as they’d handed it over. He’s not sure what the protocol is for returning it. He makes a note to Google it later.

She doesn’t come through at first. His fingers press on the planchette, sighing as he spells out her names – the one she had at birth, and the holy one he whispered when they were alone.
His fingers twitch across the board – it’s nothing. Just a muscle tightening. Until it happens again, his hand sharply spelling out four letters in almost painful enthusiasm: MINE.
He shifts on his knees, gets comfortable, tries to say I MISSED Y-.
He's cut off before he can finish. That insistent tugging on his hand, the desperate sigil repeating
MINE

MINE

MINE.

*

He doesn’t put flowers by her grave now, he puts them on the dining room table. She greets him in the morning with a tug of a blanket, the shower going cold for a moment, a mug playfully tipped over when he’s reading the paper. Each little inconvenience, every tumbled trinket, is a kiss, an intimate embrace he never thought he’d feel again.
It doesn’t matter that she turns his TV on in the night while he’s trying to sleep, unplugs his alarm so he’s late for work, hides his toothbrush in the garbage can. She’s a palpable thing again, and he loves her just as much as he did the day she died.

**

He loves her. Even when she’s like this. He holds the tissue to his nose, eyes squeezed shut like a child, willing away the blood that pours over his fingertips. His cheeks hum with pain as a bruise blossoms along the sharp jut of bone under his eye.
             “Sorry-,” he mumbles, eyeing the way the box of tissues nudges its way towards the counter edge. He reaches a hand out, claps it in place. “I’m sorry I was late,” he says to the empty room, “I’ll try to leave on time tomorrow. But you have to understand-,”
She doesn’t. How can she? She’s in the walls, curling up wallpaper, chiselling wood off the side of the door. She can’t be late ever again; there is nothing to be late to when you’re dead.

              “I’ll take some time off,” he continues, to himself but to her at the same time, “we can spend time together.”

An orange rolls out of the fruit basket, stopping just next to his hand with a little bump, not unlike when they’d walk together and she’d hint that she wanted to hold him.

               “I love you too,” he tells the empty house.

***

It’s surprising what you can get used to. He can predict when the knife is soaring through the air at him, knows how to duck his head to get just enough damage that she’ll be sated, but not enough to warrant another trip to the ER. His cheek is mottled with scar tissue, wounds that are still healing, splitting open on the rare occasions he speaks.
But there’s no one to talk to anymore except the blank walls.
Letters sit in a mound atop his doormat, and he knows he should do something about that. But what would she think if he did? A letter is like a phone call – something that could take him from her, and she won’t allow it. She’s dead, it’s not fair that he gets to have friends. It’s not fair she has to die and he gets to be alive.

If that’s even what he is. Alive. With his head so full of her ghost, it’s hard to know where the haunted ends and the haunting begins.

A plate soars through the air and crashes on the wall behind him, its splintered porcelain screaming out a chorus of a truth he’s been too scared to fully realise:

This won’t end until one of them disappears. And every day it feels more likely that it’s going to be him.